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In June, 2011 in Santiago 4,000 people attended a march to protest a proposed dam in southern Chile. People waved flags and chanted “Patagonia without dams!” By the end of the year, the protesters expanded their agenda and attracted the attention from observers across the globe. In a recent presentation at Columbia University, Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s former president, told the crowd that the current generation of protestors that is marching through the city streets of his home country “are the sons and daughters of democratic Chile.” The recent protests, though, are highlighting tensions between environmental activists and clean energy advocates, and are raising serious questions about Chile’s public policies.

Even as thousands of young protesters continue to organize marches in Santiago, Lagos is confident in his country’s ability to address the concerns of the young leaders and maintain an upward trajectory. After all, over the years, he and his peers in the government worked to strike a balance in Chile’s highly polarized political climate, and achieved a number of notable successes in many areas. As president from 2000 to 2005 he worked to implement social programs and also attract private investment. Part of the process was finding a compromise between militant leftists and hardline right-wingers. “Allende’s widow and Pinochet [in the same room together]… that’s what the transition was,” he said in his talk, an event sponsored by the Latin American Student Association.

With Lagos’ help, Chile’s government worked to expand trade links with the United States and also looked for opportunities further abroad. After all, as he writes in The Southern Tiger, his latest book, “China is rising, and Chile is today positioned for a monumental historic opportunity: to partake and participate in the new Asian economy.”

In order to take advantage of new trade opportunities, Lagos and his peers worked to help make “Chile’s infrastructure among the most robust in Latin America.” Over the course of his presidency, from 2000 to 2005, he increased the number of miles of metro track in Chile’s capital, Santiago, from 25 to 55.

He also partnered with private companies to invest more than $10 billion, expanding and modernizing the highway system that connected Chile’s northern copper producing region all the way to its isolated, southern, port cities.

The government was highly successful in many areas. Between 1988, the year Lagos and his peers started their campaign against Pinochet and 2008, the year that Michelle Bachelet, the most-recent socialist to be elected president left office, the country’s economy doubled and then tripled in size, increasing by almost 600 percent in two decades.

However-- two areas where the government was less successful were energy and equality. Chile remains one of the world’s most unequal societies and its energy infrastructure is woefully inadequate. Over the course of 2011, these two issues came together and snowballed into the current mass demonstrations taking place in Santiago.

What started as a simple march in protest against a mega-dam project in southern Chile, metastasized into the current demonstrations and helped Camila Vallejo, a 23 year old student leader get named ‘person of the year’ by the British newspaper The Guardian. After Lagos’ presentation, Cristian Salas, the Vice President of Columbia University’s Latin American Student Association, explained that the protests in his home country, Chile, are the result of a “new middle class [that] is demanding higher quality education and a more equal political and economic system.”

When the protests against the dam first erupted, Sebastian Piñera, the country’s current president said, “if we don’t make decisions today we are condemning our country to a blackout near the end of this decade.”

In recent years, Chile’s investment in hydro-power has slipped. In his talk at Columbia, former president Lagos said “In 1990 about 75 of [Chile’s] energy was hydro, now hydro represents only 45%...it’s much easier to establish a [coal] power plant.”